From My Mom – The Wings to Fly

My mother’s life-direction was a different vein.

She was brilliant, capable, able to master anything academic and see real-world applications. Armed with only a high school diploma, she went to work for a legal firm taking shorthand as a legal secretary. After two years, the law firm offered her the chance to go to law school – her way paid.

My closed-minded Irish grandfather said absolutely not. “A woman’s place is in the home.” Because “family” was such an important facet of life to her, she acquiesced rather than be split.

But Mom did defy that “in the home“part.

She went on to tackle the fields of engineering and medicine, modifying and developing her shorthand to fit the fields – without the benefit of specialized classes. Her professional goal was basically to continuously challenge herself mentally and to grow intellectually. Denied that chance for a higher education like her mother had, Mom never stopped educating herself.

Besides intelligent, she was beautiful to the point that she was offered several opportunities to model. She, instead, found beauty to be a drawback, and she often said over the years that modeling was, to her, “a narcissistic endeavor manipulated by users for their own advantages.”

A woman of brilliance and beauty constrained by misogyny, social constraints, and manipulation.

But what follows is her story.

Denied the opportunity to try higher education, she fought to make me want one.

But first, she had to help me, her severely hearing-impaired son, master speech, lip-reading, and the exclusionary practices of the public schools.

The first rule I learned from Mom was that practice makes perfect. And did we practice!

She accompanied me to every speech and lip-reading lesson and sat in room listening and observing as the therapists worked with me. Whatever speech sounds, lip-reading exercises, and vocabulary flash cards I learned there, she drilled me twice as much at home.

And then she innovated – that made all the difference.

First, she worked with my lip-reading in a mirror. She sat next to me in front of her vanity mirror, and then unpredictably alternating with and without her voice, she held conversations with me. Conversations about life, my dreams, my fears. She read to me from books.

By the hour.

This taught me to key in on the lips regardless of a mechanical aid for my hearing. Her intent?  To make lip-reading my actual “hearing -aid” and not the mechanical device.

The second innovation was “feeling” my voice. Many of us with hearing impairments speak nasally and some in a monotone. Mom wondered why the therapists didn’t address that “separating influence,” but she never received an adequate response.

So again, she innovated.

Feel your voice. Where do you feel the vibration? Change the vibration from your face to your chest. All innovative reminders and ways to self-help. And it paid off.

The last segment of her story gave my dad and me, an insight to lawyer mom would have been.

As my kindergarten year grew closer, my parents faced the exclusionary policies that the public schools practiced in regard to disabled children – especially the hearing impaired/deaf. When they attempted to enroll me, the school said they weren’t “equipped” to handle kids who weren’t “normal,” as they put it, and suggested an institution for the deaf, “where I could learn a trade.”

WOW! Wrong thing to say to Mom!

First, she requested a closed session of the school board and the presence of their attorney. My father attended as her support, (and I think she wanted to “set a scene” with his unsmiling, rugged-looks as an “implied” presence). According to dad in later years (Mom would never talk about it), she began the session discussing my compensating skills (lip-reading, hearing-aids) and my behavior, intelligence, and general personality.

At that point, she really got down to business. She cited applicable case law – federal and state – that she maintained ANY court in the land would follow, and that “we” were willing to tie the board up in legal affairs – for years and THEN we’d sue! Again she cited the grounds. But, she finished, they could just admit me, let me have a front row desk in every class, and save themselves the inconvenience.

The attorney for school board went from snide to stunned.

At the graduation ceremony at the University of Notre Dame for my second master’s degee, I walked from the stage into the audience and handed my mom that diploma and said “Thanks Mom for making this all possible.”

Food for thought.

Mac

#WomensHistoryMonth